The notorious left wing blogs heads are exploding over my remarks at our CPAC event on the corruption of CPAC leadership. Justin Elliot over at The War Room at Salon turned on his camera after my Ground Zero mosque event. In the accompanying article, Elliot writes, "At Geller's insistence, one of the 9/11 family members who she brought to the event stood by her during the interview." Justin, in accordance with left wing "journalism" standards, is being patently dishonest. I was just emerging from an emotionally draining two hours with many 911 family members, and Rosaleen Tallon was with me. When Elliot wanted to do his guerrilla interview, I agreed, and said he ought to interview Rosaleen about why she came to CPAC. He sneered ......

The notorious blogger brings her anti-Park51 campaign to CPAC, even as she denounces the conference for Muslim ties

Late yesterday, blogger Pamela Geller, originator of the Park51/"ground zero mosque" controversy, held an unofficial panel at CPAC to preview her new movie, "The Ground Zero Mosque: The Second Wave of the 911 Attacks."

There have been tensions between Geller and the leadership of CPAC, particularly American Conservative Union board member Grover Norquist, the anti-tax activist. Norquist has been a target of Geller and her cohort for years because of his friendly ties to Muslim leaders. In my interview with Geller (watch below), she accuses Norquist of actually being a Muslim Brotherhood stooge.

In any case, Geller was still able to get access to a conference room at the hotel during CPAC, though it was not sanctioned by conference organizers and did not appear on the official schedule. Her event, which featured several 9/11 family members who are fiercely opposed to Park51, drew a couple hundred people; there were few empty seats. Each family member told their Sept. 11 story and then denounced the plans to build the Islamic center near ground zero. One woman said, "This is like spitting on the grave of my son." Another: "If we have to stand there and protect that building physically -- with Pam Geller first -- we will."

The American Muslims behind the mosque were routinely referred to as "terrorists" and Geller seemed to speak for most of the crowd when she said, "What is a moderate Muslim? A secular Muslim." The tone and popularity of the event contrasted with the argument by Suhail Khan, the Muslim Republican leader I interviewed Thursday, that the conservative movement is a welcoming, inclusive place.

I spoke to Geller after the event about the alleged radical infiltration of CPAC, the events in Egypt (she has been notably supportive of Hosni Mubarak in the past), and 2012 (she likes John Bolton). At Geller's insistence, one of the 9/11 family members who she brought to the event stood by her during the interview.

Justin is being patently dishonest. I suggested he interview her about why she came to CPAC. Perhaps Justin Elliot hasn't read all of my pieces on the issue of Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan. David Horowitz gives a crash course, Justin, in his remarks at CPAC, earlier today:

Go to minute 7:40 if you can't watch the whole thing, but it's only 12 minutes, so watch it.

It is spectacular.

UPDATE: Leftwing Politico has this:

Freshman Rep. Allen West also drew thunderous applause in his keynote speech about the threat to America posed by Islam and other security threats. And as Republican candidates define their national security stands in the 2012 elections, conservative discomfort with Islam in America will be a feature of the debate.

“We are also faced at home and abroad with a mortal threat in political Islam,” conservative activist David Horowitz said in his address to the conference. “Political Islam is a totalitarian movement that seeks to impose Islamic law on the entire world through the seizure of states by stealth and electoral means where possible and by terror where necessary and sometimes by a combination of the two. There are hundreds of millions of believers in political Islam.”

CPAC organizers attempted to address this dual dynamic by holding an official panel on the threat of sharia law, with several other affiliated, but unofficial events on inclusion, religious liberty and the so-called ground zero mosque controversy, featuring the controversial blogger Pam Geller and Jihad Watch’s Robert Spencer.

“Sometimes when you hear snide comments about Jews in the ’50s or Muslims today — we’ve been through this. The Republican party chased away the Catholic vote for over a hundred years,” said Grover Norquist, an ACU board member and a tax activist who has tried to bring Muslim voters in to the GOP for more than a decade. “You chase away people politically. The thing about the political effects of bigotry — it can last generations. It’s tough to fix.”

“The answer is some people are and some people aren’t,” Norquist later told POLITICO about whether Republicans were making an effort to court Muslim voters. “Certainly, Chris Christie in New Jersey is. George W. Bush was.”

Bush’s outreach to the Muslim community netted him the single largest share of the Muslim vote in 2000, but nearly all Muslim voters drifted back toward Obama in 2008. Relations between the GOP and the Muslim community reached an all-time low when many prominent members of the GOP took public stands against the building of a mosque in Lower Manhattan.

The tensions broke most clearly to the surface in a small panel on religious freedom sponsored by the group Muslims for America and moderated by the American Conservative Union’s only Muslim board member. The discussion was interrupted several times by attendees questioning the moderator, Suhail Khan, about radical ties and sympathies.

Khan faced repeated and hostile questions about his ties and his parents ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, as a handful attendees with video cameras and recording devices crowded the rear of the room to pressed him on the terror issues.

“These are smear tactics that have circulated against me for the last 10 years,” said Khan, responding to audience questions by a participant about alleged ties to radical organizations — ties that Khan has ferociously denied, pointing to his service in the Bush administration and his security background vetting by the Department of Justice and the Secret Service for those sensitive political positions.

“My record is clear,” said Khan to the audience. “Pam Geller, Robert Spencer — they’re not part of the conservative movement. Everywhere they turn, the conservative movement is turning their back on them.” (Read the rest)

We are also faced both at home and abroad with an existential enemy in political Islam. Political Islam is a totalitarian movement that seeks to impose Islamic law on the entire world through the seizure of states by stealth and electoral means insofar as possible, and by terror where necessary, and sometimes by a combination of the two. There are hundreds of millions of believers in political Islam, and it is growing force within the Islamic world itself.

In Egypt, 85% of the population is on record approving of the death penalty for apostates who leave Islam. The same people also believe that the death penalty for defectors from the faith is a form of democracy and religious freedom. There is nothing new in this apparent contradiction. Communist totalitarians also worked through the electoral process wherever possible and through violence when necessary. They called the police states and gulags they created “people’s democracies.” The Soviet Constitution was described by its creators and by the progressive movements that defended it as “the most democratic in the world.”

The Muslim Brotherhood, which is the fountainhead of political Islam and has spawned 12 terrorist armies including al-Qaeda and Hamas is a political force in Egypt that is also willing to participate in elections and in the civil institutions of society. The Holy Land Foundation, a creation of the Muslim Brotherhood was the largest Islamic charity in America until it was raided by the FBI and put on trial in Texas for funding Hamas. One of the documents seized in a concealed basement at the Foundation headquarters and put into evidence by the FBI was the Muslim Brotherhood’s plan for America. The stated goal of this plan was to “destroy the American civilization.”

The plan called for building a secret leadership in America and for the creation of a series of Brotherhood front groups that would appear to be participants in America’s democracy until the time came when and where force would be necessary to accomplish the Brotherhood’s goals.

When I read the document, it reminded me of the Communists in America who were on trial for conspiring to overthrow the government, which they surely were, but who described themselves as Jeffersonian democrats. I knew several of them personally, including one who went underground to prosecute the violent revolution. Thanks to the imprudent tolerance of our courts, their convictions were all overturned.

The front groups that the Muslim Brotherhood set up were identified in the captured document. Among them were the Muslim Students Association, the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim American Society, and the Council on American Islamic Relations or CAIR. The latter was set up to be a so-called civil rights organization whose purpose was to use the American Constitution to advance the Brotherhood’s aims. The Communist Party had several similar fronts, including the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee and the Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born as well.

The late Mahboob Khan was an American Muslim, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and one of the founders of the Muslim Students Association. He was also instrumental in creating the Islamic Society of North America. Mahboob Khan’s widow today sits on the board of one of the regional organizations of the Muslim Brotherhood front CAIR.

Mahboob Khan also founded three mosques in California, which preach the totalitarian doctrines of the Brotherhood. In 1993 Mahboob Khan and one of his mosques hosted the “Blind Sheik” Abdul Rahman just two months before the Sheik’s terrorist group blew up the World Trade Center, killing six people and wounding more than a thousand. In 1995 Mahboob Khan and his mosque in Santa Clara, California hosted and held a fund-raiser for Ayaman al-Zawahiri, a member of the Brotherhood and the number two man in al-Qaeda after Osama bin Laden.

The Muslim Brotherhood has been wildly successful in its plan to become part of America’s civil culture and to infiltrate the institutions of America’s civil government, including the White House and both political parties, and the conservative movement as well. Suhail Khan is the proud son of Mahboob Khan and his protégé, as he is also the protégé of the convicted terrorist Abdurahman Alamoudi.

Sponsored by his longtime patron Grover Norquist, who has been a pillar of the conservative movement, Suhail Khan was given a White House appointment in the Bush Administration and facilitated Alamoudi’s access to the president. Suhail then became an Undersecretary of Transportation where he received a top security clearance. With Grover’s support Suhail has also been made a board member of the American Conservative Union and was the moderator of a panel on Religious Liberty yesterday at this event.

Suhail Khan used his offices in the Bush White House with Grover’s connivance to carry water for the terrorist Sami al-Arian in an attempt to ban the use of secret evidence in terrorist trials – a proposal that thanks to Grover’s immense political influence was actually endorsed by President Bush and was only thwarted by the 9/11 terror attacks.

Over the last ten years the influence of the Brotherhood has spread throughout our government. There is nothing new in this sad reality. In 1938 Whittaker Chambers attempted to warn President Roosevelt that one of his White House advisers, Alger Hiss, was a Soviet agent. When Roosevelt was given Chambers’ information, he laughed and disregarded it. Alger Hiss remained as the president’s adviser until the House Un-American Activities Committee flushed him out.

In the midst of the current crisis in Egypt, our biggest ally in the Middle East, both Secretary of State Clinton and the present director of national intelligence have given the Muslim Brotherhood an imprimatur as a peaceful, moderate and democratic organization. FBI directors appear at the annual dinners of CAIR, and the president has appointed members of the Islamic Society of North America to top positions in the Department of Homeland Security.

Frank Gaffney has been the courageous bringer of the bad news about Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan to the board of the American Conservative Union. Many good conservatives on the board have refused to believe the evidence of Suhail Khan’s Brotherhood allegiances and agendas. They are of the opinion that Suhail’s public appearances with Alamoudi and the Muslim Brotherhood fronts took place a decade ago, and that he doesn’t promote violent agendas. I understand this. My parents were Communists in the heyday of Stalin. The Party’s slogan was not “Bring on the dictatorship of the Proletariat” or “Revolution Now.” But that is what they believed. The slogan of the Communist Party was “Peace, Jobs and Democracy.”

As for the question of whether Suhail Khan believes now what he openly said then, my answer is this. When an honest person has been a member of a destructive movement and leaves it, he will feel compelled to repudiate it publicly and to warn others of the dangers it poses. This is a sure test of whether someone has left the Muslim Brotherhood or not.

I urge conservatives to school themselves in the nature of the Muslim Brotherhood and the networks it has spawned. And to be vigilant against its spread into the ranks of the conservative movement and the government of the country they love.

Comments

"Pamela Geller Versus CPAC"

The notorious left wing blogs heads are exploding over my remarks at our CPAC event on the corruption of CPAC leadership. Justin Elliot over at The War Room at Salon turned on his camera after my Ground Zero mosque event. In the accompanying article, Elliot writes, "At Geller's insistence, one of the 9/11 family members who she brought to the event stood by her during the interview." Justin, in accordance with left wing "journalism" standards, is being patently dishonest. I was just emerging from an emotionally draining two hours with many 911 family members, and Rosaleen Tallon was with me. When Elliot wanted to do his guerrilla interview, I agreed, and said he ought to interview Rosaleen about why she came to CPAC. He sneered ......

The notorious blogger brings her anti-Park51 campaign to CPAC, even as she denounces the conference for Muslim ties

Late yesterday, blogger Pamela Geller, originator of the Park51/"ground zero mosque" controversy, held an unofficial panel at CPAC to preview her new movie, "The Ground Zero Mosque: The Second Wave of the 911 Attacks."

There have been tensions between Geller and the leadership of CPAC, particularly American Conservative Union board member Grover Norquist, the anti-tax activist. Norquist has been a target of Geller and her cohort for years because of his friendly ties to Muslim leaders. In my interview with Geller (watch below), she accuses Norquist of actually being a Muslim Brotherhood stooge.

In any case, Geller was still able to get access to a conference room at the hotel during CPAC, though it was not sanctioned by conference organizers and did not appear on the official schedule. Her event, which featured several 9/11 family members who are fiercely opposed to Park51, drew a couple hundred people; there were few empty seats. Each family member told their Sept. 11 story and then denounced the plans to build the Islamic center near ground zero. One woman said, "This is like spitting on the grave of my son." Another: "If we have to stand there and protect that building physically -- with Pam Geller first -- we will."

The American Muslims behind the mosque were routinely referred to as "terrorists" and Geller seemed to speak for most of the crowd when she said, "What is a moderate Muslim? A secular Muslim." The tone and popularity of the event contrasted with the argument by Suhail Khan, the Muslim Republican leader I interviewed Thursday, that the conservative movement is a welcoming, inclusive place.

I spoke to Geller after the event about the alleged radical infiltration of CPAC, the events in Egypt (she has been notably supportive of Hosni Mubarak in the past), and 2012 (she likes John Bolton). At Geller's insistence, one of the 9/11 family members who she brought to the event stood by her during the interview.

Justin is being patently dishonest. I suggested he interview her about why she came to CPAC. Perhaps Justin Elliot hasn't read all of my pieces on the issue of Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan. David Horowitz gives a crash course, Justin, in his remarks at CPAC, earlier today:

Go to minute 7:40 if you can't watch the whole thing, but it's only 12 minutes, so watch it.

It is spectacular.

UPDATE: Leftwing Politico has this:

Freshman Rep. Allen West also drew thunderous applause in his keynote speech about the threat to America posed by Islam and other security threats. And as Republican candidates define their national security stands in the 2012 elections, conservative discomfort with Islam in America will be a feature of the debate.

“We are also faced at home and abroad with a mortal threat in political Islam,” conservative activist David Horowitz said in his address to the conference. “Political Islam is a totalitarian movement that seeks to impose Islamic law on the entire world through the seizure of states by stealth and electoral means where possible and by terror where necessary and sometimes by a combination of the two. There are hundreds of millions of believers in political Islam.”

CPAC organizers attempted to address this dual dynamic by holding an official panel on the threat of sharia law, with several other affiliated, but unofficial events on inclusion, religious liberty and the so-called ground zero mosque controversy, featuring the controversial blogger Pam Geller and Jihad Watch’s Robert Spencer.

“Sometimes when you hear snide comments about Jews in the ’50s or Muslims today — we’ve been through this. The Republican party chased away the Catholic vote for over a hundred years,” said Grover Norquist, an ACU board member and a tax activist who has tried to bring Muslim voters in to the GOP for more than a decade. “You chase away people politically. The thing about the political effects of bigotry — it can last generations. It’s tough to fix.”

“The answer is some people are and some people aren’t,” Norquist later told POLITICO about whether Republicans were making an effort to court Muslim voters. “Certainly, Chris Christie in New Jersey is. George W. Bush was.”

Bush’s outreach to the Muslim community netted him the single largest share of the Muslim vote in 2000, but nearly all Muslim voters drifted back toward Obama in 2008. Relations between the GOP and the Muslim community reached an all-time low when many prominent members of the GOP took public stands against the building of a mosque in Lower Manhattan.

The tensions broke most clearly to the surface in a small panel on religious freedom sponsored by the group Muslims for America and moderated by the American Conservative Union’s only Muslim board member. The discussion was interrupted several times by attendees questioning the moderator, Suhail Khan, about radical ties and sympathies.

Khan faced repeated and hostile questions about his ties and his parents ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, as a handful attendees with video cameras and recording devices crowded the rear of the room to pressed him on the terror issues.

“These are smear tactics that have circulated against me for the last 10 years,” said Khan, responding to audience questions by a participant about alleged ties to radical organizations — ties that Khan has ferociously denied, pointing to his service in the Bush administration and his security background vetting by the Department of Justice and the Secret Service for those sensitive political positions.

“My record is clear,” said Khan to the audience. “Pam Geller, Robert Spencer — they’re not part of the conservative movement. Everywhere they turn, the conservative movement is turning their back on them.” (Read the rest)

We are also faced both at home and abroad with an existential enemy in political Islam. Political Islam is a totalitarian movement that seeks to impose Islamic law on the entire world through the seizure of states by stealth and electoral means insofar as possible, and by terror where necessary, and sometimes by a combination of the two. There are hundreds of millions of believers in political Islam, and it is growing force within the Islamic world itself.

In Egypt, 85% of the population is on record approving of the death penalty for apostates who leave Islam. The same people also believe that the death penalty for defectors from the faith is a form of democracy and religious freedom. There is nothing new in this apparent contradiction. Communist totalitarians also worked through the electoral process wherever possible and through violence when necessary. They called the police states and gulags they created “people’s democracies.” The Soviet Constitution was described by its creators and by the progressive movements that defended it as “the most democratic in the world.”

The Muslim Brotherhood, which is the fountainhead of political Islam and has spawned 12 terrorist armies including al-Qaeda and Hamas is a political force in Egypt that is also willing to participate in elections and in the civil institutions of society. The Holy Land Foundation, a creation of the Muslim Brotherhood was the largest Islamic charity in America until it was raided by the FBI and put on trial in Texas for funding Hamas. One of the documents seized in a concealed basement at the Foundation headquarters and put into evidence by the FBI was the Muslim Brotherhood’s plan for America. The stated goal of this plan was to “destroy the American civilization.”

The plan called for building a secret leadership in America and for the creation of a series of Brotherhood front groups that would appear to be participants in America’s democracy until the time came when and where force would be necessary to accomplish the Brotherhood’s goals.

When I read the document, it reminded me of the Communists in America who were on trial for conspiring to overthrow the government, which they surely were, but who described themselves as Jeffersonian democrats. I knew several of them personally, including one who went underground to prosecute the violent revolution. Thanks to the imprudent tolerance of our courts, their convictions were all overturned.

The front groups that the Muslim Brotherhood set up were identified in the captured document. Among them were the Muslim Students Association, the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim American Society, and the Council on American Islamic Relations or CAIR. The latter was set up to be a so-called civil rights organization whose purpose was to use the American Constitution to advance the Brotherhood’s aims. The Communist Party had several similar fronts, including the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee and the Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born as well.

The late Mahboob Khan was an American Muslim, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and one of the founders of the Muslim Students Association. He was also instrumental in creating the Islamic Society of North America. Mahboob Khan’s widow today sits on the board of one of the regional organizations of the Muslim Brotherhood front CAIR.

Mahboob Khan also founded three mosques in California, which preach the totalitarian doctrines of the Brotherhood. In 1993 Mahboob Khan and one of his mosques hosted the “Blind Sheik” Abdul Rahman just two months before the Sheik’s terrorist group blew up the World Trade Center, killing six people and wounding more than a thousand. In 1995 Mahboob Khan and his mosque in Santa Clara, California hosted and held a fund-raiser for Ayaman al-Zawahiri, a member of the Brotherhood and the number two man in al-Qaeda after Osama bin Laden.

The Muslim Brotherhood has been wildly successful in its plan to become part of America’s civil culture and to infiltrate the institutions of America’s civil government, including the White House and both political parties, and the conservative movement as well. Suhail Khan is the proud son of Mahboob Khan and his protégé, as he is also the protégé of the convicted terrorist Abdurahman Alamoudi.

Sponsored by his longtime patron Grover Norquist, who has been a pillar of the conservative movement, Suhail Khan was given a White House appointment in the Bush Administration and facilitated Alamoudi’s access to the president. Suhail then became an Undersecretary of Transportation where he received a top security clearance. With Grover’s support Suhail has also been made a board member of the American Conservative Union and was the moderator of a panel on Religious Liberty yesterday at this event.

Suhail Khan used his offices in the Bush White House with Grover’s connivance to carry water for the terrorist Sami al-Arian in an attempt to ban the use of secret evidence in terrorist trials – a proposal that thanks to Grover’s immense political influence was actually endorsed by President Bush and was only thwarted by the 9/11 terror attacks.

Over the last ten years the influence of the Brotherhood has spread throughout our government. There is nothing new in this sad reality. In 1938 Whittaker Chambers attempted to warn President Roosevelt that one of his White House advisers, Alger Hiss, was a Soviet agent. When Roosevelt was given Chambers’ information, he laughed and disregarded it. Alger Hiss remained as the president’s adviser until the House Un-American Activities Committee flushed him out.

In the midst of the current crisis in Egypt, our biggest ally in the Middle East, both Secretary of State Clinton and the present director of national intelligence have given the Muslim Brotherhood an imprimatur as a peaceful, moderate and democratic organization. FBI directors appear at the annual dinners of CAIR, and the president has appointed members of the Islamic Society of North America to top positions in the Department of Homeland Security.

Frank Gaffney has been the courageous bringer of the bad news about Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan to the board of the American Conservative Union. Many good conservatives on the board have refused to believe the evidence of Suhail Khan’s Brotherhood allegiances and agendas. They are of the opinion that Suhail’s public appearances with Alamoudi and the Muslim Brotherhood fronts took place a decade ago, and that he doesn’t promote violent agendas. I understand this. My parents were Communists in the heyday of Stalin. The Party’s slogan was not “Bring on the dictatorship of the Proletariat” or “Revolution Now.” But that is what they believed. The slogan of the Communist Party was “Peace, Jobs and Democracy.”

As for the question of whether Suhail Khan believes now what he openly said then, my answer is this. When an honest person has been a member of a destructive movement and leaves it, he will feel compelled to repudiate it publicly and to warn others of the dangers it poses. This is a sure test of whether someone has left the Muslim Brotherhood or not.

I urge conservatives to school themselves in the nature of the Muslim Brotherhood and the networks it has spawned. And to be vigilant against its spread into the ranks of the conservative movement and the government of the country they love.